Writing The Body



PERHAPS
photograph by Andrew Brown

 Helene Cixous talks about 'writing the body' as a way of re-claiming the female body from its patriarchal textulisation. Cixous believes that through life we acquire patriarchal ideas through the discourse of language and we need to deconstruct these. She says this is possible through the language of the 'female' which she asserts is deeply rooted in our bodies and our sexuality. Cixous spoke of a woman's need to 'write' her body in order to challenge the ideas of women as 'other' in relation to a dominant male subject. That female is seen as negative to the male positive, that women are inferior to men. The idea that subjectivity is constructed through the linguistic sign system of language, the 'symbolic order' that privileges male at the expense of the female. Cixous believes that by 'writing the body' the female can speak her subjectivity and challenge the patriarchal system.